Cybersecurity practitioners take a community-driven strategy to fixing issues. Security researchers share the vulnerabilities they discover with the broader cybersecurity group, which permits corporations to patch up their safety holes earlier than one thing catastrophic occurs.
Prequel is seeking to convey that very same strategy to software program.
The startup is constructing a database of software program failure patterns or misconfigurations in Linux workloads. The database is up to date by a rising group of engineers and builders who change details about reliability. Prequel’s software program then sits in an organization’s current software program stack and constantly checks for bugs and failures by pulling from this database.
The firm’s co-founders, Tony Meehan and Lyndon Brown (pictured above left to proper), each have backgrounds in safety; each labored on the National Security Agency and at cyber operations platform firm Endgame.
Brown informed TechCrunch that when software program fails, engineers should pour over limitless knowledge logs to attempt to spot the difficulty earlier than they’ll begin to mitigate it. For some software program points, only some folks on the firm know sufficient in regards to the applications to even be capable to assist.
“We’ve lived it the place I’ve needed to name a former worker in a previous life and say, ‘Hey, I do know you left the corporate, however nobody is admittedly understanding how this specific service works. Can you assist us out?’” Brown mentioned. “We’ve had prospects inform us tales about driving to folks’s homes in the course of the night time and knocking on the fallacious door to type of get assist.”
Brown and Meehan puzzled why there wasn’t the identical type of system for software program bugs as there was for sharing information on safety vulnerabilities. When they observed nobody was making progress on this space, they determined to provide it a go.
“If folks have seen this drawback earlier than, you can truly convey to bear to your drawback,” Meehan mentioned. “That was like an anchoring level for us. How will we construct a product very like what we did in safety 15 years in the past that might unlock this group of those that have seen recognized failure and open supply software program?”
Prequel was launched in 2023 and has been working in stealth to this point. The firm says it already has its tech deployed in a handful of Fortune 500 corporations and has constructed its group community as much as round 500 folks.
Now the corporate is popping out of stealth and saying a $3.3 million seed spherical led by Work-Bench with participation from Runtime Ventures, Operator Partners and a slew of angel buyers that perceive this drawback, together with Shay Banon, the CTO of Elastic, and Jon Oberheide, the previous founder and CTO of Duo Security, amongst others. The capital shall be put towards product improvement and increasing the detection library.
Prequel’s largest competitors are knowledge observability and monitoring merchandise, Brown mentioned, which additionally monitor software program for potential failures and bugs. Companies on this house embody Datadog and Splunk.
But Brown argues that observability platforms are solely nearly as good because the engineering expertise you place in entrance of them. Moreover, any of those platforms solely assist corporations sort out their catastrophic failures after they occur, whereas Prequel’s strategy allows folks to begin tackling issues earlier, earlier than they get to the extent the place solely a choose few folks know the right way to resolve them. He added that not like a few of these corporations, they don’t cost their prospects for knowledge transfers both, since all their knowledge stays with prospects — they solely cost a subscription for the service itself.
The staff welcomes competitors although, Meehan mentioned, as he thinks that extra gamers centered on this house, might be a tide that lifts all boats.
“Failure is fixed in trendy functions, and groups are actually solely in a position to get to the failures which might be like catastrophic or the failures which might be having like buyer affect,” Brown mentioned. “What we’re actually enthusiastic about is enabling groups to actually get a greater deal with on the mass of issues that exist and with the ability to make prioritization selections.”
